aging folks are far too quick to forget what it was like to not know as much as they know now.

My class were complaining last night that there is a whole lot of election coverage they don’t understand because it makes too many assumptions about knowledge that they don’t have… this is a related idea.

don’t agree that voice over is only a crutch – it can cetainly be used as you’ve described, but not every time.

A good recent example is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, where the voiceover is sometimes at odds with the action and adds another layer to pay attention to rather than straightening everything out.

An extra-special exception is made for Sam Elliot, because The Dude Abides.

Watch how often voice over only occurs at the beginning and end of a film. The screenwriter want the audience to get off on the right foot, and leave the theatre with the details worked out. Generally if voice over occurs throughout a film, it’s being used more expertly as a meaningful storytelling tool.

Here’s a good litmus test: Ask yourself whether the voice over is essential understanding to the plot or character development. It rarely is.

That said, I do agree with your notion about ‘taking things as rote’. Smart contemporary films do this all the time–lousy ones don’t. David Mamet’s films offer excellent (and usually enjoyable) examples of this practice.

VO also often assumes a certain lack of intelligence in the audience. I don’t always want to know the backstory or the unseen, I’d rather piece it togher myself. Some of the best movie experiences happen when you debate what really happened afterwards on the drive home.

On the larger question of “as read,” again, that’s a quality issue to me, more than genre knowledge. You say “got it” during the Bank Job not because you know what’s coming, but because what’s coming wasn’t done well. In the best genre movies you know what’s happening but you still want to see it because the quality of execution is so juicy.

Grant: I agree that as we learn a genre, we can handle a lot of “data compression”–just tell me how this version differs from the template, since I already know the template. Of course, this assumes that we don’t enjoy recapitulation of the template even when we already know it, and making this recapitulation enjoyable and somehow still fresh is a critical point for the skilled genre practitioner.

I would take this point about data compression even further: It should be possible to tell huge amounts of story, including development of characters, in relatively short run-times by leaving out intermediate scenes and skipping ahead. The audience knows what would have inevitably happened in between what is shown. A good example where this was done is the beginning of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, where a fairly complicated backstory is established in a couple of minutes. I wonder what could be done if that pacing were applied to a whole movie.

1 – storytelling perspective
To me, most of the VO I see is a cheat. It’s lazy storytelling. It’s poor exposition substituting for poorer filmmaking, telling instead of showing.

As first-person narrative, which most of VO is, it fails to honor the character’s perspective (instead, using the character as a stand-in for a narrator) while at the same time failing to play with the first person unreliability (misjudging others, being wrong, lying, remembering for convenience). In short: boo. VO is a hack’s crutch.

2 – economic perspective
VO is easy to translate for global markets. No one sees the narrator’s lips move.